This article considers the significance of the moving image as an archival record and its implications for the ways in which memory interacts with history. As a defining technology of recording and documenting, film is entangled with history in its making: however, what kinds of narrative ensues from images whose contextual references are opaque to us? What can we garner from footage whose indexical connections have been lost? By focusing on the artistic practice of filmmakers Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi, I suggest a reading of early-twentieth-century archival film footage, including found footage and home movies, in terms of affect. Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's approach focuses on the procedural features of the frame and an excavation of the features that can be drawn from its defining connotations. Through an excavation of the most minute details within the frame, they point out the kind of ‘presence’ that film projects back to us as gesture, expression, and movement and abstract from them forgotten memories of everyday encounters and the affective forms that mundane actions took. In particular, I shall focus on works by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's that deal with encounters with ‘the other’ and the visual practices of representation that inform them. The legibility that Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi's approach brings to a reading of archival film footage is indicative for broader methodological considerations of the ways in which the moving image encodes affect and emotion. This is relevant for an understanding of what Lauren Berlant refers to as the ‘realm of the social’ by uncovering the structures of perception and representation of the past and the significance that they might take in the present.